Another Speed Camera Could Be Way Off Calibration

WBAL's Steve Fermier reports on the latest problem claimed against city traffic cameras. Download This File

Update:

The "speed and red-light camera taskforce" created by Baltimore City Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Balke met Friday to talk about the issue. They decided to not shut down problem speed cameras, rather they've asked the vendor of the camera to add "another level of security."

A representative of Xerox, the company that makes the speed cameras, sat in on the meeting but said he "didn't know enough about the issue" to talk about it with WBAL.

However, Xerox told those in the meeting that it is investigating and told the city to take steps to make sure the cameras are accurate.

"Now what we are having them do is every single one, potential citation, they are going to look at the video and still pix and basically do a rough measurement," said Frank Murphy, deputy director Baltimore City Transportation.

But, AAA wants to know why that wasn't done earlier.

"Why not shut it down, as I've said repeatedly, until we can get to the bottom of what the errors are and then put them back in place?" said Ragina Averella with AAA Mid Atlantic.

"It's important to keep them running as long as we can assure they are 100 percent accurate. That's the important part, so if we had any reason to believe that somehow something would slip through then shut down might be the right option," Murphy said.

WBAL has learned the vendor gets paid per ticket.

The questions keep coming about city speed cameras, and whether they are doing what they are designed to do with precision.

Earlier, the camera pointing eastbound on Cold Spring Lane toward Falls Road near Polytechnic was found to have snapped photos mostly of delivery trucks inaccurately measured going too fast in the 30 mile an hour lane.

Now the city transportation department has asked the company that supplies the cameras to investigate yet more problems but with the westbound pointing camera nearby as well.

The Sun reported the westbound facing camera also is issuing tickets possibly erroneously.

A westbound Subaru was clocked going 56, but actually it was closer to 30.

This week state auditors pointed to calibration problems found when the state set up mobile speed cameras in construction zones.

Those cameras, which are not connected with the city's own system, cost the state more than $800,000 in potential fine revenues that were never collected because of accuracy problems. The citations were not issued in those cases, the audit found.